The Book of Why by Nicholas Montemarano Read Free Book Online

Wiz.
    My father waved to me on the stoop, and the men he worked with said, Hey, kid , and I ran to the curb and watched the compactor crush trash—bottles and boxes, rotting food and old shoes, a vase, a rug, a broken vacuum cleaner—all of it gone.
    Every day my father brought me something he’d found in the trash: a blue button that must have fallen off a sweater, a beekeeper’s mask, a white clown shoe, a transistor radio, rubber balls, beer caps, matchbooks. Whatever he brought home I saved in a trunk. The tongue from a baby shoe, the felt headband from a fedora, a blue tassel from a red fez. Birthday cards and breakup letters. Magic wands and handcuffs. A holy card of Christ on the Cross.
    One day my father brought home a silver watch he found at the bottom of a trash can. “A gift for you,” he said.
    I wound the watch, but the second hand didn’t move.
    â€œIt’s broken,” I said.
    â€œWell,” he said, “we’ll have to fix it.”
    He laid the watch in my palm and told me to close my hand carefully, as if the watch were an egg.
    â€œClose your eyes,” he said, “and see the watch working. See the second hand moving.”
    I felt him put his hand over mine. He tapped my hand a few times, then said, “Move. Come on—move!”
    He had me say it with him. “Tell the second hand to move,” he said.
    â€œMove,” I said.
    â€œSay it like you mean it.”
    â€œMove,” I said.
    â€œLike you really believe.”
    â€œMove!”
    â€œThat’s more like it,” he said.
    â€œMove, move, move,” I said, and each time he tapped my hand.
    â€œOkay,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”
    I opened my eyes, then my hand: not only was the second hand moving, but it was bent up toward the glass.
    â€œSometimes that happens,” my father said.
    He told me it was probably a good idea not to tell my mother, given how she felt about such things.
    My father brought home other dead watches, and together we brought them back to life, but the first one was always my favorite. The watchband was too big, so I carried it around in my pocket.
    The games we played—magic, my mother said—became a kind of religion, which is to say they brought me joy cloaked in a mystery I couldn’t quite put into words. If given the choice of discovering God or my father as a fraud, I would have been better able to handle the debunking of God. If God were exposed as a figment of humanity’s imagination, no more than wishful thinking, a coping mechanism, then at least I wouldn’t be the only fool. But my belief in my father was mine alone, and I alone would have borne the disappointment should his powers have turned out to be mere tricks.
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    The day after Halloween, my father took me to the cemetery. I was ten. He had wanted to take me to Houdini’s grave the night before, at midnight, but my mother had said no.
    Now, after a late-morning storm, trees dripped with rainwater; the grass soaked my sneakers and the tips of my father’s brown work boots.
    We removed dead flowers from gravesites and propped up others, still alive, that had fallen. We passed a stone so old its name and date were unreadable; the stone had turned black. My father touched it; I was afraid he might catch death.
    The stained glass of a mausoleum had blown in. We stopped, and my father looked inside. I was tall but not tall enough to see, so he lifted me.
    Inside was a chair made of stone, nothing else. I imagined someone sitting in the chair, alone, forever watching over the dead. Then I thought: No one will ever sit in the chair. The names of the dead were engraved on plaques on the walls.
    We continued through mud puddles until we reached a large monument with three steps leading to a statue of a weeping woman. I thought at first that she was Mary mourning Christ, but then I saw the bust: it wasn’t Jesus but a man wearing a